Remember the radfem blogger who says all heterosexual intercourse (PIV, penis-in-vagina) is rape? Sure you do.
Well, it turns out that her insane theories are secondhand madness, as it were, and one of her main sources of lunacy is a book published 20 years ago by a trio of feminists, the lead author being Dee Graham, a professor of psychology at the University of Cincinnati.
How I discovered this: Wednesday, on a hunch, I rooted around in my bookshelves and found Daphne Patai’s 1998 book Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism. As I say, this was a hunch — hey, if radical feminists are declaring that heterosexuality is a myth and that all women are naturally lesbians, a book called Heterophobia might offer some clues. (Who says men aren’t intuitive, huh?) So, after briefly quoting Patai in a post Thursday, I continued reading and came across this on Page 174:
Dee Graham . . . claims to be able to explain the very existence of heterosexuality in women by invoking what she calls the “Societal Stockholm Syndrome.” In a 1994 book entitled Loving to Survive, Graham expounds her theory in minute detail. As in the famous Stockholm bank-hostage episode in 1973, in which four hostages bonded with their captors and came to see the police as their common enemy, women — so the argument goes — are eternally held hostage to men. . . . The point of all male behavior is domination . . . Heterosexual behavior thus becomes a “survival strategy” for women, as do “feminine” characteristics, which result from women’s need to ingratiate themselves with their “captors.” . . .
Graham’s thesis makes it impossible to distinguish in a meaningful way between situations of genuine abuse and the ordinary life of heterosexual women. And that is precisely the point. Men are women’s captors. Women are men’s hostages. Heterosexuality is the form of their subjugation.
Bizarre as it may seem, Graham’s theory has been widely embraced by feminists, and is cited by the radfem at Radical Wind:
In other words, the strategy is to program us to respond to men’s violence through dissociation and trauma-bonding, and cloak/rename these responses as “love” or “attraction” to men — so on the top of it they make us believe we want it.
Let’s recall what trauma-bonding is: if we look at Dee Graham’s work (p.4,Loving to Survive), for a woman to trauma-bond to a man:
- she must perceive her captor — the man — as having powers of life and death over her
- she must believe that she cannot escape, and that therefore her life depends on her captor
- she must be isolated from outsiders so that his perspective is the only perspective available
- she must feel as if her captor — the man — showed her some kindness or attention.
This situation of captor-to-hostage is the situation of all women to all men. (This is also the point that D.G. makes in her book). That is, all men hold all women captive. All women are prisoners and hostages to men’s world. Men’s world is like a vast prison or concentration camp for women. This isn’t a metaphor, it’s reality. Each man is a threat. We can’t escape men. We are forced to depend on men and male infrastructures for our survival. Men’s perspective (and men’s language that names their perspective) is the only perspective available and we are isolated from other women and woman-centered perspectives.
And the radfem blogger concludes:
[H]eterosexuality doesn’t exist and our “urges” to bond with [men] emotionally or sexually aren’t natural drives but normal PTSD reactions to years of abuse and mind-programming.
There you have it, ladies and gentlemen: Lesbian separatism as the only alternative to being captive to male violence — “Each man is a threat”! — an idea directly derived from a single book published 20 years ago that you probably never heard of, but which has been far more influential than anything published by Graham’s critics.
This intellectual theory is so easily refuted by common sense that it almost seems a waste of time to do so.
Two words: Voluntary cooperation.
For the vast majority of human history, and still for many millions of people today, simply surviving required voluntary cooperation between members of families, tribes and communities. My own grandparents, Alabama farmers, had to work sun-up to sundown six days a week merely to have the basics of life. It is only under conditions of widespread affluence that anyone would have the inclination — or the luxury of spare time — to look at male-female relationships and accuse men of exercising domination through violence against women, or to imagine that the pair-bonding of husbands and wives was the result of “PTSD reactions to years of abuse and mind-programming.”
To quote Orwell: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
